Nearly Nero by Loren D Estleman

Author:Loren D Estleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

Bright and early the next morning I was in the Brooklyn garment district, which looks a lot like the Manhattan original of times gone by, with workers pushing carts of suits, coats, and dresses hanging from rails across the street any old where in the block, and displays of irregulars in front of cut-rate shops and gaggles of colorful characters pretending to chew the fat on the corners while waiting for something to fall off the back of a truck. (I started to look for my cousin Mickey in the group, then remembered he still had six months left on his year-and-a-day.) Very early Runyon. Messassarian & Sons operated out of a walkup with an open flight of stairs with advertisements stenciled on the risers offering alterations and merchandise. From the age of the layout I figured Krekor Messassarian was one of the original sons.

The room took up an entire floor, with bolts of material on pipe racks and a cutting table the size of an indoor swimming pool littered with paper patterns and pieces of fabric and big shears and thousands of straight pins glittering under strong overhead lights. There was a unisex changing booth behind a curtain and a platform in front of a three-way mirror where the customer du jour could stand and keep an eye on what the tailors were doing with his inseam.

“Just routine,” Musty said, introducing me to his staff. “For the insurance. Just routine.” If I was the one who’d copped the coin I’d have been diving for the fire escape the third time he said it was just routine. They all gave me the fisheye and went about their work while the boss showed me the locked cabinet where he kept his collection with a little shelf built under it for spreading it out and examining it under a strong glass. There were loose coins on the shelf he said were no great shakes, mixed up with needles and other gear that had wandered away from the work area. The cabinet lock was a Taft. I could have picked it with a noodle.

He had a picture of the missing piece. The Persian king was a weak-chinned jasper with a hoop in his ear. He looked like a female impersonator.

I’d Googled him. He’d gone to war with Rome and lost, the northern barbarians had kicked his butt, and he’d managed to get the Chinese province to sue for peace because the emperor was too busy fighting off the Mongols to give him any time. He spent half his life as a hostage held for tribute and choked to death on a fig. The way I saw it, “Axolotl the Adequate” suited him better. But his coin was worth, well, a king’s ransom, so he was my favorite historical figure after Willie Sutton.

Messassarian had three people on staff: a nephew named Norman Pears, shaped like his surname, who at middle age looked a little less like a bloodhound than his uncle, but he had

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